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NO PLACE TO HIDE (182 pp.)--David Bradley--Atlantic--Little, Brown ($2).

The voice of the bombardier came clearly to all hands at Bikini: "Skylight One, Skylight One. Two minutes before actual bomb release. Mark: two minutes . . . Adjust all goggles . . . Stand by ... Coming up ... Bomb away. Bomb away. Bomb away . . ."

From his plane window 20 miles off, Radiological Monitor Bradley saw the "huge column of clouds, dense, white, boiling up through the strato-cumulus." The next move in Operation Crossroads was his; and a few minutes later he and his plane were flying toward Bikini Atoll and the "evil mushrooming" column.

On the Beam. Bradley's job was terrifyingly simple. As one of the doctors attached to the Bikini experiment, he had to go into the bomb region with Geiger counters and other instruments, and tell the Army & Navy which areas were too "hot" to be handled safely by their investigators. When, for example, he tested the atmosphere underneath the deadly cloud canopy, his instruments hardly turned a hair--a "boiling updraft" had already swept all floating fission products' high above him. But when he headed down toward the target ships, the Geiger counters "sang" like mad. "Each [ship] seemed to catch us in a beam, as though from a searchlight."

No Place to Hide is, in essence, an excellent list of the places in which Bradley's Geiger counters burst into song. The average Navyman, who thought that the bomb was expected to pulverize its targets, was at first elated by the relatively undamaged condition of many of the ships (some of them could get up steam and float properly). There was less to be elated about three weeks later after Test Baker (the underwater explosion). To old salts, the spectacle of the Radiological Monitors, "decked out in galoshes, gloves, coveralls, and mask . . . creeping along the passages . . . waving a magic black box," was unnautical and absurd. When told by one of the monitors that the deck he was standing on was hotter than hell, the Navyman whistled up his scrubmen. They scrubbed and scrubbed, Navy-way --but still the Geiger counters sang.

Roaches' Requiem. They sang over the ship's watercoolers and evaporators, over the food, coffee, soap bars and even the cockroaches of the storerooms. They sang particularly loud over the tarry caulking of the deck planks and spots of rust. The tuna fish made them sing, and so did the coral and the very sands of the lagoon. Oil streaks that had floated miles away remained menacingly hot. So insignificant was the salubrious effect of salt water that even the rocky ledges of neighboring atolls clung to their radioactivity in the teeth of foaming breakers.

The Navy, says Author Bradley, only admitted defeat when they found that they could not begin to "cool" a ship's exterior by a complete removal, by sandblasting, of every inch of paint, plus the planing off of a half-centimeter of all deck plank. And, to clinch matters, the Radiological Monitors found that even when radioactivity was not registering on ordinary instruments there might still be "free plutonium" present, the "most insidious poison known."

Singing Souvenir. Some of Author Bradley's findings at Bikini are still being hushed up in the "Secret" drawer, he says. The novelty and importance of his published diary are not in his conclusions about the bomb ("There is no real defense"), but in the cold-blooded documentation of his daily dealings with it. He believes that the public, though wise to the bomb itself, is still wildly ignorant of what radioactivity is, although "we know more about it than we do of measles."

The man-in-the-street is still too much like the Bikini sailor, who was so impressed by the bomb that he thought nothing of hiding a lethal chunk of bombed scrap iron in his locker, to take home as a souvenir. Luckily for him, a nearby Geiger counter screamed its head off, and the sailor was parted from his prize before its gamma rays could kill him.

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